We all know such words and phrases as trojan horse, achilles heel, and odyssey, which trace back to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. This week features less-familiar words that trace back to characters mentioned in the Iliad. We open with:

myrmidon –AHD: a faithful follower who carries out orders without questionM-W: a soldier or a subordinate civil officer who executes cruel orders of a superior without protest or pity

The Myrmidons were the fierce tribe who accompained Achilles, their king, to the Trojan War. By fable they were ants changed into men (Greek myrmex = "ant"), suggesting a swarming horde.

quote:former Senator and governor Abraham Ribicoff, upon resigning the board of directors of Time-Warner: "I have never in my life been with a board so subservient to the chairman or the CEO. I think Steve Ross's contract is one of the most outrageous things that has ever happened. Nobody is worth that kind of money. You have a bunch of myrmidons on the board completely manipulated by Steve Ross, stooges to give Steve Ross anything he wanted."

After Cassandra, a daughter of King Priam of Troy. Apollo in infatuation with Cassandra bestowed upon her gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she spurned the god he converted the gift to a curse by fating that she would not be believed. Thus her curse was to know of future disasters and yet be powerless to prevent them.

The Iliad mentions Cassandra, but it is the Aenied that tell how she was helpless to warn her countrymen of the danger concealed in the Trojan Horse:

Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate,We haul along the horse in solemn state;Then place the dire portent within the tow'r.Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour;Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree,All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy." (Aeneid 2.323, Dryden translation)

The word is use, in a review of a biography of Rudyard Kipling:

quote:The trajectory of his life matched the trajectory of the British Empire from its zenith to its final decades. He himself was transformed from the apostle of success to the prophet of national decline, a Cassandra warning of dangers that successive governments refused to face.

The UK newspaper The Daily Mirror used to have a columnist who wrote under the name of Cassandra. In my youth I wondered why a middle-aged man (evidenced by his photo at the top of the article) would use a woman's name.

When I learnt the meaning of Cassandra a few years later, I wondered at the pessimism of a man who presumably thought that no-one would take any notice of what he wrote.

If he were still writing today, I would imagine that 90% of the Mirror's readership would ask themselves the first question. The other 10% wouldn't notice.

nestor or Nestor: a venerable and wise old man (AHD); one who is a patriarch or leader in a field. (M-W) After the character Nestor in the Iliad:

quote:[S]uch was Agamemnon, with the beating turmoil in his bosom from the deep heart, and all his wits were shaken within him. ... Now to his mind this thing appeared to be the best counsel, first among men to seek out Nestor, the son of Neleus, to see if Nestor with him could work out a plan ... that might drive the evil away from all the Dannaans. Iliad X, 9-19

(Lattimore translation. The Butler translation appears commonly on-line, but with an error: it ends with "see if between them they could find any way of the Achaeans from destruction", omitting the word "saving".)

hector (transitive): to intimidate or dominate in a blustering wayhector (intransitive): to behave like a bully; swagger

In the Iliad, Hector was the son of Priam, and the leading warrior defending Troy. On-line references confirm that his name is indeed the source of the english verb.

But the meaning has oddly mutated. In the Illiad, Hector is an admirable, noble character, a worth opponent. His name derives from Greek ekho, or "protect", and Homer often refers to him as Troy’s "protector". (Book XXIV 485-501 , after Hector's death [Ian Johnston modern translation]: Then Priam made his plea, entreating: "Godlike Achilles, I fathered the best sons in spacious Troy, yet I say now not one of them remains. But I had one left, guardian of our city, protector of its people. You've just killed him as he was fighting for his native country. I mean Hector. For his sake I've come here, to Achaean ships, to win him [his body] back from you.")

The word in use:

American vs. British Usage by Tina Blue, January 17, 2001: There is an unfortunate tendency among Americans to adopt a hectoring tone when they take it upon themselves to correct other people's grammar or usage.

On-line article, 2002: There's something about the moralistic tone of the no-smoking campaigns that makes a lot of us want to reach for our fags in defiance … I don’t like being hectored, lectured at or treated like a naughty child.

Also chimera: a fanciful mental illusion or fabrication. Chimera (greek mythology): a fire-breathing she-monster usually represented as a composite of a lion, goat, and serpent; from the Greek meaning "she-goat".

I stretch a bit to call this an "Iliad word". In Iliad Book VI, Glaucus proudly recites that he is the grandson of Bellerophon, who killed the Chimera.

The word in use:

quote:The much advertised Soviet invasion of Western Europe was a fantasy . . . a fear widely recognized by posterity as chimerical.Henry Kissinger, in 1994 treatise, as quoted by Col. Alan J. Parrington

"Chimera" has acquired another meaning, in modern-day cloning research. A chimera combines the DNA of two distinct species (as a sheep and a goat); a clone, in contrast, is genetically identical to the single "parent".

(Parenthetically: chimera is also sometimes used where the two genetic parents are of a single species -- as where the nuclear DNA from one sheep is inserted into a cell from another sheep. The progeny will appear identical to the former parent, like a clone, but will have the mitochodrial DNA [that is, the DNA outside the cell nucleus] from the latter parent. I haven't found a definition of "chimera" precise enough to include such a "single species chimera" but exclude an offspring produced by combining DNA of a mother and father in [ahem] the ordinary and familiar way.)

I found pending legislation in both Great Britain and Canada regarding human-animal chimeras.

The word in use:"Princeton’s 'Smart Fans,' have railed at season’s end against thersitical cheers and jouncing the stands at basketball games." Princeton Spectator, Tuesday, March 3, 1998

thersitical - loud and abusive; foul-mouthed, scurrilous An extremely rare word, not in AHD or M-W, from Iliad Book II:

quote:Thersites still went on wagging his unbridled tongue--a man of many words, and those unseemly; a monger of sedition, a railer against all who were in authority … the ugliest man of all those that came before Troy--bandy-legged, lame of one foot, with his two shoulders rounded and hunched over his chest. His head ran up to a point, but there was little hair on the top of it…with a shrill squeaky voice.

But reflect: Thersites is literature’s first common man to stand up against to abuses of the royalty. I view him as heroic. Homer (whose audience was the nobility, after all) gave him bad press, but put in his mouth a wholly valid argument ("We do all the work, and you get all the benefit"), to which the nobles can respond only by beating him.

quote:[W]hat more do you want? Your tents are filled with bronze and with fair women, for whenever we take a town we give you the pick of them. Would you have yet more gold ... I or another Achaean has taken ...? or is it some young girl to hide and lie with? It is not well that you, the ruler of the Achaeans, should bring them into such misery. Weakling cowards, women rather than men, let us sail home, and leave this fellow here at Troy to stew in his own meeds [sic] of honour, and discover whether we were of any service to him or no.

"Chimera" has acquired another meaning, in modern-day cloning research. A chimera combines the DNA of two distinct species (as a sheep and a goat); a clone, in contrast, is genetically identical to the single "parent".

"Clone" was originally a botanical term, referring to a plant produced by asexually means. H. J. Webber, in 1903, said "Clons..are groups of plants that are propagated by the use of any form of vegetative parts." (dictionary.oed.com)

The Texas Tech University Plant and Soil Science Department says a chimera is a type of mutation:"Bud sports may be expressed as chimeras which are mutations that occur in particular cell layers." That's a new definition to me, and I question its validity.

Switching from the plant to the animal kingdom, I looked up "chimera" in the Genome Glossary (from the Human Genome Project Information site):

Chimera (pl. chimaera) An organism that contains cells or tissues with a different genotype. These can be mutated cells of the host organism or cells from a different organism or species.

"Chimera" has acquired another meaning, in modern-day cloning research. A chimera combines the DNA of two distinct species (as a sheep and a goat); a clone, in contrast, is genetically identical to the single "parent".

"Clone" was originally a botanical term, referring to a plant produced by asexual reproduction. H. J. Webber, in 1903, said "Clons..are groups of plants that are propagated by the use of any form of vegetative parts." (dictionary.oed.com)

The Texas Tech University Plant and Soil Science Department says a chimera is a type of mutation:"Bud sports may be expressed as chimeras which are mutations that occur in particular cell layers." That's a new definition to me, and I question its validity.

Switching from the plant to the animal kingdom, I looked up "chimera" in the Genome Glossary (from the Human Genome Project Information site):

Chimera (pl. chimaera) An organism that contains cells or tissues with a different genotype. These can be mutated cells of the host organism or cells from a different organism or species.

tinman: "Chimera (pl. chimaera) An organism that contains cells or tissues with a different genotype. These can be mutated cells of the host organism or cells from a different organism or species."

Yesterday NPR radio had a fascinating story on human chimeras. It's suspected that the phenomenon is much more common than previously supposed, but is only detected in extraordinary circumstances such as in the story.

A woman needed a kidney transplant, so she and her sons were given genetic testing for possible match. Incredibly, her gene type was inconsistent with her being their mother.

It was not a matter of "switched at birth". Further testing revealed that she was a chimera. Apparantly her mother had conceived fraternal twin girls, but the fertilized eggs had combined in utero to develop a single individual - some of whose cells bore the genes of one "girl," and some of the other. Thus genetically she was two separate persons, in one body. The cells her sons inherited from her were from one girl; the cells in her genetic test for the transplant happened to be from the other.